1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to intelligent software agents. More particularly, it relates to a computer-implemented Hook-Up Assistant (HUA) capable of intelligently assisting a user to get together (hook-up) with one or more identified parties at the most convenient time for all parties involved.
2. Description of the Related Art
The most advanced, state-of-the-art communication devices can be virtually useless if the person that you desperately try to reach is unavailable. To make it even more frustrating, often times you have no idea when and if that person will be available and where and how you can get in touch with him or her at the earliest time and place that would be the most convenient for both of you. Such “hook-up” problems can undesirably snowball in a “phone tag” situation. “Phone tag” is an everyday experience where one party calls the other, only to find that other party is unavailable, and leaves a message requesting the other party to call back. The other party gets the message and calls back, only to find the original caller unavailable, and thus leaves a message for a call back, and so on. This can go back and forth many times, frustrating both parties and wasting considerable time.
Many types of intended hook-ups can cause a “phone-tag” situation, i.e., to attempt to arrange for a get together, at least two parties leave messages for each other in a back-and-forth fashion. Two criteria essentially define the challenge of solving the hooking-up problems. First, the parties must find and agree on a time when and where they are mutually available for a certain event. Second, they must actually meet, talk, communicate, get together, or otherwise participate in the event at the agreed time. The hook-up problems can be very complex and difficult to solve when multiple parties are involved and/or when special locations, resources, or communication channels must be reserved, furnished and utilized.
Certain personal calendar, group and shared calendar, and collaborative scheduling software programs are currently available on the market to address some simple forms of the hook-up problems. For example, Meeting Maker, Inc. offers a calendar management system that can process requests for a meeting among co-workers and search all co-workers' schedules that are maintained and accessible by the system. The system identifies possible times for meetings and proposes these possibilities to the co-workers or their human assistants. The human assistants confirm the meeting time and the system adds it to the co-workers' calendars/schedules. In this example, all co-workers use the same calendar management system within the boundaries of a single organization/entity. This prior art system essentially provides a centralized means of finding time slots on everyone's schedule that permits a requested meeting to be scheduled, or suggests the best possibilities if not everyone can be accommodated.
Like Meeting Maker, most commercially available calendaring/scheduling products do not address hook-up problems related to connecting people whose calendars and schedules are not singularly coordinated using the same computer program and/or within the boundaries of the same entity. Meeting Maker recently announced the Scheduling Web Services Toolkit, a program development tool designed to allow software and web developers in an organization to integrate Meeting Maker's time management engine into their own organizational portals, company intranet or other applications. Specifically, the Meeting Maker Web Service connects the Apache Axis Web service engine to the Meeting Maker Java interfaces to allow access to Meeting Maker data and functionality for any application that knows how to read and write industry standard SOAP-formatted XML (eXtensible Markup Language). This provides cross-platform programmatic access which can be used to add Meeting Maker access to enterprise applications such as portals or data mining applications. The Meeting Maker Web Service aims to eliminate the need of enterprises to use the Meeting Maker native or web Client to access Meeting Maker's real-time scheduling capabilities. Although, conceptually, users of the web service may view their calendar data and edit, create, and delete activities and banners without being confined to the boundaries of their respective organizations, they unfortunately would still have hook-up problems because the Meeting Maker Web Service does not offer hook-up services.
Another web-based scheduling approach faces similar drawbacks. In “A Meeting Scheduling System for Global Events on the Internet,” Geneva, Switzerland, July 1998, Ahmed et al. propose a scheduling algorithm for large, global conferences. To make the system capable of processing multiple meetings concurrently with minimal wastage of timeslots, the bidding method of the traditional Contract Net protocol is extended. More specifically, the scheduling algorithm employs additional heuristics to achieve preferred outcomes, taking into consideration factors such as degree of participation and times of day for people operating in different time zones and calendars. Ahmed et al.'s approach is built on the assumption that it is not always necessary for all prospective participants to attend a meeting. Thus, the algorithm finds a time slot that best meets the requirements of the host of a conference and the potential participants and does not attempt to arrange hooking up individual participants who may not be able to attend the conference.
Consequently, hooking up with people who are not part of the same managed domain and/or are not supported by a common scheduling application remains a major, unsolved problem. Moreover, initiating and effecting cross-platform, borderless hook-ups is a persistent challenge. What is needed in the art, therefore, is an intelligent assistant that can make hooking up with intended parties an easy, effortless experience.